Roorkee Chapters: "Impressions"

Neither external manifestations of love,,,nor the external materialistic energies…but it is the passion which we extract from our own soul is what binds our mind,body and soul together…

December 2011

I began my second reading of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, the story of Esther, a fine,young woman and her ascent into depression,at the same time, I was fighting an internal battle between my hopelessness and my zeal to survive in architecture, There was a time when I used to get 3 migraine attacks a week,,, and I lived on doses of combiflam and stemetil tablets, but always I convinced myself, through my poetry, through my Hope that good times are around the corner, the silver lining on the dark clouds of gloom…!!

"I felt very still and empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo."

Sure, bad times didn’t last for long, but I realized that the gap between me and Architecture was increasing, it was alarming for me, it was a career, for which I went against everyone else’s wishes..!!one has to be brutally selfish at times, but anyway,…here I am, and it’s a pleasure to begin writing again, and washing away all those negating thoughts and all the suffocating air and aura.

March arrived with a new opportunity to work, in New Delhi…there was a certain comfort factor in my new office, in fact, which I loved, but gradually, everything began deteriorating at a rapid rate, I could not wait to get out of that empty corporate life, where I had nothing but a 14” bulging screen to my eyes.

That was when I made a revelation:

I break apart from this Dual life…

A perturbation…

I am adamant to get out…

Not sure of what gets in….

This hard shell crushing beneath….

An admonition…

I am vertical…

Propped up over there….

Enchanting verses by the midnight…

A Stupid idiot box throughout the day…

An incarceration….

Chained and Blindfolded….

I would go back if I can…

An Ambition…

One erratic ladder….

I tear apart these shackles….

A  24 year old cargo boat….

An Illusion….

I want to be complete….

And this is a

Revelation.

I was adamant, stubborn, determined to explore,,,,to exploit myself, to get beyond my shackles of blank verses and seeing the world through “my” eyes,,,,,I just wanted to be me!! And there was a long way to go…there is still a long way to go…I need to explore and extract my mind inside out. But in the end, a sudden calm superimposes you after a period of strife, and that is what happened in my case, a sudden calm , a sudden swell in energy, and a promise to sustain for long, to write, to love, to eat, to run, to realize the beauty of all the mundane things in my life.

A new life has certainly begun on a good note, all I can want is to be content with the sea of knowledge. Working hard is my job and everything has been just thrown before me just like sacred flagpoles thrown pell mell after a festival. And it is upto me, how I want to “Live” J

As Shakespeare said-

“If you can look into the seeds of time,

And tell which grain will grow and which will not,

Speak then to me”

I can only wait and watch what Roorkee has to offer me J